LOL, you wouldnt believe me if... nm.
Youre not getting the point that Steam is a standalone program, do you? You HAVE to start it before playing, you have to deal with its idiotic design before you can play and you have to end it after playing (if you even bother). Tell me why Blizzard or any other honorable developer should do something like that? Since Diablo 1 there hasnt been one big change. Autopatching is a nice feature. I never said it sucks in Steam... but it shouldnt happen while youre in a game.
On the other hand if you look closely (not that I really expect you do or did, judged by your biased posts) you will notice that Valve already screwed with their customers with shutting down WON while still thousands of people were playing over it and versions that were only playable over it. And still you want to look at the forums how many people dislike Steam and yet they dont change even the worst issues. The normal intelligent person should learn from something like that even if he/she wasnt affected by it. Why shouldnt they do something like that again? Valves support never has been the best. Remember all the bugs in TFC? They are still present. Besides if you look closely at a traffic log (if you know what that is) you will notice Steam always contacts Valve quite a lot from time to time, while in a game or if it just sits in the taskbar "doing nothing". That is bandwidth hogging. People hate it when Windows does something like that, get cracks, firewalls, tweaks etc just to block those accesses, but if Steam does it, its okay. Alright!
Even if it doesnt bother you that some applications contact their developers all the time, you might want to sum them all up. If you dont have a T1 or similar, it will screw you sooner or later. For me that autoupdate of my AntiVirus software is too much already. If it does that while I play online and fight someone right then I will lose in that case for sure. Thats why I set it up to not bother me while playing.
Steam also uses CPU power frequently if you watch your taskmanager a bit. When a process uses CPU power while you play demanding games, there will be short slowdowns in the game. Sometimes very noticeable and sometimes not. I have used programs that needed less than 1 MB and still slowed my systems down noticeably. I dont care about 3MB, I have a lot of processes running, but most of them dont use CPU power frequently without a reason, and if they do they will be shut down before I play such a game or completely uninstalled if not replaceable or necessary. I was talking about all developers having the same kind of shit as online platform, and I guess all together would be a little more than 3MB, dont you think, Mr. Scottsman?
I can already taste your answer to this... mmmmhhh "But MMORPGS... and others can add spyware too". Youre pretty predictable.
But please go on, it helps my ego quite a bit.

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I don't like arguing. Why can't we all just get along instead of fighting and arguing?